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Debates about the “tragic mulatto” or “tragic mulatta” genre of ¤ction and its uses have centered on its realism, or lack thereof. Sterling Brown, identifying the genre as the source of a pervasive stereotype in his 1937 survey The Negro in American Fiction, pointed out that the genre tends to rely more on popular white perceptions of mulatto life than on the lived experiences of mixed-race individuals; as Werner Sollors puts it in his summary of Brown, these characterizations were often “merely derived from convention and not from life” (223). For his part, Sollors is largely unconvinced by Brown’s reasoning that the genre is inherently contaminated by its stereotypes.The danger,Sollors argues,is that no depiction of biracial people’s lives will be found acceptably to detach itself from available stereotypes, “making any representation of biracial characters appear to be ‘unrealistic’ and potentially dangerous heterostereotypes ” (232). All characterizations are in some sense conventional, and in Sollors’s view it makes sense to evaluate the work performed by individual representations of mulattos, but not from any imagined purist position. Although he does not make much of it, implicitly Sollors seems to believe that Brown’s argument is based on an appeal to racial authenticity, a ¤ctive convention no less stereotypical or hazardous than those surrounding the ¤gure of the mulatto . To an extent, Sollors seems unfair toward Brown, who does not argue against representations of mulatto characters per se but against the “tragic mu56 2 Time Passing  Chesnutt’s Revisions of the “Tragic Mulatta” Tale latto”as a stereotype. Still, the point is well taken that even a seemingly conventional portrayal, ¤rmly within the genre, might have subversive possibilities: “[I]t is possible to see the outline of a less visible counter-tradition in which the Mulatto actually appears as a most upsetting and subversive character who illuminates the paradoxes of ‘race’ in America” (234). In his ¤rst long works that focus on African American characters, the longunpublished novella Mandy Oxendine (which ¤nally appeared in print in 1997) and the successfully published novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt seems both to subscribe to and to “illuminate the paradoxes of” the standard conventions for racial ¤ction at the turn of the century, especially those concerning mixed-race people. Critics of The House Behind the Cedars, in particular , have debated whether or not the novel quali¤es as subversive or is merely a conventional, stereotypical portrayal.1 That his novel resides on the border between these interpretations illustrates, at least, that Chesnutt was not strongly or openly able to decimate the genre and its harmful stereotypes. On the other hand, he was very much engaged with what was then a largely unacknowledged problem within realism: given that our notions of “reality” are substantially infused with conventions of thought, how can a writer—even assuming he was able to imagine himself, to a degree, out of the boundaries of these conventions—induce his readers to see things through new eyes? This philosophical problem was for Chesnutt also a practical one. Although he assumed that a sympathetic audience, consisting of some black readers but primarily liberal whites, was capable of supporting his writing career, he also seemed to sense that this audience would react favorably only to an approach that was reassuring rather than challenging. He writes implicitly with the attitude that his white, Northern readership will welcome an exposé of racism in the South, but might squirm if asked too directly to regard their own implication in racial injustice or to consider their own responsibility to act. Such an approach as his readers would ¤nd acceptable could not satisfy Chesnutt’s desire to be a politically effective writer unless he managed to exercise great care and skill, and his attempts to negotiate the problem of audience carefully and skillfully account for much of what can be seen in his ¤ction. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston A. Baker, Jr., takes on the twinned questions of how African Americans may survive and how they may create new representational spaces for themselves by de¤ning two major strategic categories: “mastery of form” and “deformation of mastery.” In the former, any subversive intent is deeply masked, and a writer narrates experience in a seemingly conventional matter in pursuit of “some intended gain” (31). In the latter, one “distinguishes rather than conceals . . . secures territorial advantage and heightens a group’s survival possibilities” through a more disruptive, 57 Time Passing  less conservative narrative...

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